Letters: LTP will raise debt and expenditure

Cameron Bagrie, former ANZ chief economist, advised (Business, May 10) that six global economic indicators (confidence, contagion, costs of borrowing, commodity prices, currency and China) point to a coming recession, that technological change is accelerating, and accordingly, that organisations must put innovation into their DNA.

Let's apply this advice to Rotorua Lakes Council's performance and its Long Term Plan.

Officials wrote the LTP before partitioning consultations with stakeholders without public hearings. Council's confidence in the LTP could be group-think bravado.

It ignores Donald Trump's egocentric willingness to disrupt world trade which triggers high-speed contagion through the world's equity markets.

In this context the LTP will raise debt and expenditure locally.

Our national economy will also feature big spending, growing international debt and low savings. Both will encounter rising interest rates and daily fluctuations in commodity and currency prices.

It is a time for prudent investment in critical infrastructure, not wasteful vanity and legacy projects.

Bagrie's advice, when applied to LTPs, suggests that the LTP is technologically and strategically archaic.

It ignores block chain technology, artificial intelligence, and the integration of material, social, digital and organic systems. It uses obsolete socialist ideology instead of pragmatic and even-handed attention to well-being, profits, environmental sustainability and innovation.

The advice, in my view, highlights the council's blindness to its genetic limitations that replicate its toxic corporate culture and its casual attitude to democratic norms and reality.

It has no plans for structural reinvention, evidence-based service development or organisational learning.

Its LTP will reproduce factional priorities, profligacy, partisan short-termism and bureaucracy. (Abridged)

Reynold Macpherson
Rotorua

What was the point?

I read Rosemary McLeod's column (Opinion, May 11) with my mouth agape.

What on earth justified giving a whole page to what I assume to be an attempt at humour but came across more like a primary school child's homework?

What was the point of this four whole page columns? Beats me.

William Wright
Rotorua

Final refuge

Thanks to Linda Hall for her article, Space, the final refuge (Opinion, May 7).

For years many of us have been concerned about the hazardous junk floating around in space and the disastrous impact it's having on the environment.

Billions of dollars are spent on space explorations, etc. Better spent looking after the planet we live on.

In saying this we must all take some responsibility in looking after the environment.

Sue Williams
Pukehangi

Transparency

It's hard not to notice the similarities between Merepeka Raukawa-Tait's BoP Times and Rotorua Daily Post column (Opinion, May 3) and that of John Tamihere in the NZ Herald this week. Probably it's just pre-Budget positioning.

If not, their joint call for a wholesale assault on MSD staff - on the basis that money so spent is 'wired the wrong way', 'shaped over 200 years ago' (quoting Mr Tamihere) and makes it necessary to 'tip out current employees and bring in a new crop' (paraphrasing Ms Raukawa-Tait) is dangerously close to confusing the baby with the bath water.

Since (here I'm reflecting the expressions of both of them) transparency and accountability are undeniably important, it would be great to see some similar gestures from the North Island Commissioning Agency of Whanau Ora that they both are part of.

They too hold power. They too could model close touch with clients and with agencies such as Te Tuinga Whanau, which I am proud to belong to.

We've put out several invitations to them, so we might understand their culture ('the way they do things around here'), and so far we are none the wiser. Except, of course, for the opinions they express in the newspapers.

Nau mai, haere mai, Merepeka e Hoani: we'd love to see you at our place. And to work constructively with you, and MSD, to improve things for our whānau. Which, we believe, is the real point.

Beth Bowden
Trustee, Te Tuinga Whanau